Games – Page 7 – ɔimoɈɒ

New Games Publishing Companies starting up…

Kotaku writes: UK retailer GAME told MCV that while it might not be planning a huge pipeline of holiday titles, it plans to selectively use its distribution channels to publish undiscovered titles under its own brand name. “If it works commercially for GAME and helps a smaller publisher get off the ground by GAME sharing … Continue reading “New Games Publishing Companies starting up…”

Kotaku writes:

UK retailer GAME told MCV that while it might not be planning a huge pipeline of holiday titles, it plans to selectively use its distribution channels to publish undiscovered titles under its own brand name.
“If it works commercially for GAME and helps a smaller publisher get off the ground by GAME sharing some of the risk, then we would look at it â€“ we have a distribution channel and we can offer a service.”

Wow, that’s a big step and further evidence that the gaming industry, which was previously thought to be sewn up, is in fast growth mode. There are more and more publishers coming out of the woodwork but you have to consider where they’re coming from and where they’re going to:

For some sectors of the market, the game industry entry bar is low due to readily available tools and development equipment that most consumers would have. Look at Microsoft’s XNA – a version of it is available for free download in addition to the other DreamSpark tools free to students, it’s taught in several universities (including QUB and UU) and, according to a comment on the RPG podcast “Fear the Boot”, developers have been hired to the XBox team based on their released work using XNA. Games created using XNA Game studio are limited to non-commercial scenarios for Xbox 360 titles. However, the software may be used to create commercial games which target Windows.

Having loaded Steam onto my MacBook Pro via CrossOver Games (but not yet loaded any games) just a couple of days before buying four games at the Apple iTunes App Store for iPhone, it’s obvious that digital distribution is the future of gaming – though the WHERE of the distribution is something yet to be decided by the market. Apple has their iPhone platform sewn up, Microsoft is retaining some good control over their XBox marketplace but the market for Windows/Mac (and I guess, most smartphones) is pretty open and could do with a few more publishers. Maybe someday someone could make a success out of developing games for Linux?

They never had this when I was growing up…

SeriousGames.ie Welcome to the DIT Experimental Gaming Group Wiki. EGG (the Experimental Gaming Group) is a cross faculty research group for digital games in the DIT. EGG has members from the School of Computing, Digital Media Centre and the Learning Technology Group. Our aim is to develop courses and research on digital games, serious games, … Continue reading “They never had this when I was growing up…”

SeriousGames.ie

Welcome to the DIT Experimental Gaming Group Wiki.

EGG (the Experimental Gaming Group) is a cross faculty research group for digital games in the DIT. EGG has members from the School of Computing, Digital Media Centre and the Learning Technology Group. Our aim is to develop courses and research on digital games, serious games, robots and toys.

I wonder if I could get an invite to visit there? (They might have a hard time getting me to leave!)

I recently watched a video podcast (via iTunes) from the Learning Games Initiative from the University of Arizona regarding culture and language acquisition through game interactivity. Imagine playing World of Warcraft or The Sims if the language and culture presented was all Turkish or Chinese. It would add context to the ‘roleplay’ situations often presented to students learning languages (as I recall from French, German and Mandarin classes). Students would also be better motivated to discover – though the game has to be enjoyable. I certainly enjoyed playing my Francais versions of Age of Empires and Call of Duty 2 I picked up in Paris one year.

Though I’d not consider my own mis-spent youth to have been particularly educational (too much Manic Miner and Saboteur), I think that games are already educational. Consider that I’d never heard of a Banyan Tree before playing games and look at the Myst games as examples of how an entire culture can be related through a hypercard stack in the form of a game (and consider how this can be tied into Location-based services turning a tourist guide into a game, a challenge and a learning aide).

I have some plans in this regard. Looking for a few good eggs.

The Gaming Market: time to break in?

Following on from earlier posts, it would seem that casual gaming on the iPhone is going to be big – and big for the consumer as opposed to the publisher. There are some incredibly fluid and fun-looking games like Rolando as well as the traditional games like MahJong. And if you like the idea of … Continue reading “The Gaming Market: time to break in?”

Following on from earlier posts, it would seem that casual gaming on the iPhone is going to be big – and big for the consumer as opposed to the publisher. There are some incredibly fluid and fun-looking games like Rolando as well as the traditional games like MahJong. And if you like the idea of using your iPhone like a steering wheel, there’ll be a hundred games like it – I’ve seen about 20 by now – and it makes the one or two which have an on-screen steering wheel seem innovative in comparison.

Market Size in terms of Potential Customers
If you went by market size, the mobile market as a whole would seem incredibly lucrative with a billion handsets being sold every year (or some equally incredible number). Only 10% of these are smartphones and the memory and resources on some of the non-smartphones mean that casual gaming is limited to mini-golf, snake and tennis games reminscent of the console games of the 1980s.

The PC industry similarly is massive with worldwide PC shipments for 2008 estimated to be nearly 300 million units (according to Gartner) but a large percentage of these will not be participating in the gaming market as they are put to work as ATMs, information monitors, shop tills and overpowered typewriters. The PC industry also has high expectations on the quality of games and for those people who want simpler games – it’s a flooded market and realistically you’re competing against Solitaire which is on every Windows PC known to man. That said – the cost of development tools has dropped considerably so that it is accessible to the hobbyist – look at Unity, XNA or any of a hundred other game engines and game development applications.

The handheld gaming market, dominated by the Nintendo DS Lite with 51 million units shipped (and the original DS shipped 20 million) and the PlayStation Portable with 37 million units shipped, would also seem to be massive but this is an expensive market to try to break into.

After that, the Console industry would seem most lucrative due to the numbers of units sold (the Wii has shipped 24 million from November 2006 to March 2008, XBox 360 has sold 19 million from November 2005 to March 2008 and Playststion 3 has sold 13 million from November 2006 to March 2008) but the costs for making games in those markets can be incredibly high (as we have discussed before) and you need separate toolkits for each console – driving the cost of development up.

Market size can’t, therefore, always be an indication of the number of potential customers – it has an effect, certainly but, as an example, the Nintendo DS market of 70 million has a potential customer size of zero if you can’t afford the costs of building a development team, training them and purchasing the tools required for game development on that console.

I attended an InvestNI event a couple of years ago where the consensus from a paid market research company was that the gaming market at the time was stagnant. It was too hard to break in due to the costs and the lead that other companies and other countries had was too big to break. I thought at the time it was probably not far from the mark especially where the mainstream consoles lie.

In contrast, newer handhelds like the iPhone, though with only 6 million shipped (and millions predicted for the next 6 months) has a much higher potential market size. This is because:

The tools for building are readily available and free (though there’s a Â£50 charge for the certificate)
Due to the App Store distribution, the customers are accessible and many of them are looking for new software to load
The hype machine is already built.

The proof is in the pudding. We have companies coming out of the woodwork to provide applications – whether these be games, IM apps, clients for their online services or just utilities. Unity (mentioned above) has also announced they will be making their game engine capable of creating iPhone games.

This is good, of course, because competition lowers prices and the consumer gets the break here. It’s a new platform, probably with 20 million potential customers by year end.

It’s hard to comment on the shakeup that Android and a new Open Symbian operating systems will bring to the market but it’s definite that the market is changing from the stagnant episode of the last few years.

Ngmoco to target iPhone

From Gamasutra, Neil Young, former head of Electronic Arts (EA) Blueprint and Electronic Arts LA has jacked in the high profile job at EA in order to produce iPhone games at his new studio ‘Ngmoco‘. In the interview he describes the iPhone and App Store as a disruptive element in the ecosystem (my words) which … Continue reading “Ngmoco to target iPhone”

In the interview he describes the iPhone and App Store as a disruptive element in the ecosystem (my words) which involves several fundamental shifts from the way things have been done in the past.

…more than half the time the average iPhone is in use, it’s being used for something other than making a telephone call. If you think about that concept, that is a fundamental shift.

…from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it’s got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it’s location-aware, it’s got all of your media on it, it’s awake with you, it’s always on, and it’s always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it’s got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.

…if you think about what Apple’s doing with the App Store, they’re really turning mobile on its ear. They allow you to control the pricing yourself. They’re taking a distribution fee for distributing your software, but they’re really allowing users to choose what to put on their phone and how they want to enhance their device. And that is a fundamental shift.

The company has three roles:

So commissioning, financing, and producing titles ourselves, that’s the first party. Then there’s the second party, which is looking to the independent developer community and asking ourselves, “What great ideas are out there that need to be funded and financed?”
And lastly, it’s a third party for people who don’t necessarily need our producing experience or our financing, but the opportunity to work with us within an ecosystem

As Ngmoco will be a publisher more than a developer, it allows them to spot interesting games that might want to move to other mobile platforms as they become available – migrating the software to Android or the new ‘open’ Symbian operating system when it appears. It’s all about spotting the intellectual property and getting it licensed and published in order to maximise return and providing their previous expertise in order to make the most of it. Potentially very profitable if iPhone sales estimates are to be believed (6 million iPhone 1.0 sold already, 14 million iPhone 3G predicted in latter half of 2008 and 24 million iPhone 3G predicted for 2009)

From what I can see, Ngmoco’s job will be mostly to introduce new developers to the cut-throat gaming market.

You Got Game? You need ‘skillz’

The BBC writes about the skills shortage in the Games Industry: The games industry says British universities are failing to equip graduates with the skills it needs. The warning comes from the industry campaign group “Games Up?”, which says games developers in Britain are facing a serious skills shortage. The lobby group says there are … Continue reading “You Got Game? You need ‘skillz’”

The BBC writes about the skills shortage in the Games Industry:

The games industry says British universities are failing to equip graduates with the skills it needs. The warning comes from the industry campaign group “Games Up?”, which says games developers in Britain are facing a serious skills shortage. The lobby group says there are now 81 video games degree courses at British universities. But only four are accredited by Skillset, the government body which monitors such courses.

The courses available would be a factor but do you need a degree to be an ace in anything?

I don’t think so. I think the Games Lobby could work to reduce the cost of entry to the gaming market. For instance, the cost of a development kit for the Sony Playstation Portable is Â£50,000 for hardware alone and an extra Â£5,000 per person for the tools. Additional software like Renderman might add thousands more to the tally and this is all before you figure in salaries.[1]

This barrier to entry is not insignificant. If hackers in the home cannot work on these things, if universities cannot afford these costs or if students can’t work on them part time, then they are not going to develop the skills to compete in this marketplace.

Microsoft has given some lip service to this criticism with the XNA Game Studio Express. For $99 a year, you can transport code onto your XBox 360. This isn’t going to be the same as a full developer kit (I mean, you’re not going to cloning Halo 3 with it) but I know of some people who have been hired based on the quality of their XNA Community contributions. Reading the specifications, it really provides an interesting alternative.

That said, the market can be extremely profitable. While an edge case, Halo 3 cost around $50 million to develop but took in $170 million in sales on the first day. Compare this to Pacman – Atari spent around $100,000 to develop for the Video Computer System but made $300 Million back. costs of development are undoubtedly spiralling.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Nintendo hopes to offer development kits for as little as Â£1732 per developer and Sony does offer development kits to some schools and colleges at a cut price.

I think that Android and the iPhone will start to pave the way here – they offer free development kits, the iPhone offers hardware in excess of the PSP or Nintendo DS Lite (and presumably shipping Android hardware will be comparable) and they’ll make it really easy to buy and download new software (as we’ve seen already with iPhone).

It will be up to educators, lobbyists, interested civil servants and enterpreneurs to bridge this gap.

[1] Source: The Northern Ireland Digital Content Strategy (InvestNI)

Apple to trump Nintendo in Gaming?

The short answer is:No. Touch Arcade writes: Apple Poised to Snatch the Crown from Nintendo™ DS Combine this seamless distribution model with beefy gaming hardware, a CPU that’s over six times the combined clockspeed of the DS’s processors (and nearly twice the clockspeed of the PSPs) and a screen with 50% more area than that … Continue reading “Apple to trump Nintendo in Gaming?”

The short answer is:No.

Touch Arcade writes:
Apple Poised to Snatch the Crown from Nintendo™ DS

Combine this seamless distribution model with beefy gaming hardware, a CPU that’s over six times the combined clockspeed of the DS’s processors (and nearly twice the clockspeed of the PSPs) and a screen with 50% more area than that of the DSs dual screens combined and you’ve got a winner, right?

I’d have thought by now that people, especially people who follow Apple, would have realised that specifications do not a success make. How many times has the iPod bucked the trend and beaten other players soundly even though it sports relatively meagre specifications?

Apple has kitted out the iPhone to compete with other smartphones and, perhaps to a lesser degree, subnotebooks. I certainly find it a lot more pleasurable to type on my iPhone than on my eeePC laptop keyboard. And yes, there will be a heap of games released for this new platform, but you have to ask yourself – is it truly a gaming platform – the answer is simply No.

Thinking about iPhone 2.0

In the next week, we’re going to see what Apple has on offer from WWDC. Everyone is expecting some news about the new iPhone models because, with the exception of a minor memory storage upgrade, the iPhone will have been on sale for 1 year without any changes and Apple likes to upgrade their devices every 9 months – 1 year. So it’s not a bad speculation. What are we likely to see in terms of hardware? Faster wireless is for one thing. It’s a little early for solar-panel displays but we could reasonably see the camera gaining a hardware ‘button’ and a small camera mounted on the front of the device for video conferencing.

We’re also going to see the new iPhone operating system. The big news there is obviously the Application Store. Why do I want it? So I can play a couple of casual games while I’m not in a good network region. So I can read my RSS feeds while mobile without the clunkiness of the online readers. So I can twitter by only sending my data and receiving others twitter data rather than having to receive the text and graphics from pockettweets. It would be nice to be able to receive MMS messages and also to be able to forward the odd SMS but, to be honest, there are a lot more easy wins in this respect. Double-tap to zoom in a mail message for the idiots who keep sending me 800-pixel wide images as their email signature?

waffle writes some speculation about the 3G iPhone

“Loading freeze-dried sites from bookmarklets using the current iPhone software takes almost as long as loading the site itself, which suggests an efficiency problem in the browser and rendering software, not the network hardware.”

Except that the bookmarklets on your home screen are just bookmarks – they’re not freeze dried copies of the web sites themselves. The renderer in MobileSafari over EDGE is quick enough to outpace the slower renderers on faster 3G networks so I think we can reasonably expect that if the EDGE limits are removed, we shall get much faster data and therefore faster rendering.

Lots to think about and only a week to go.

Wii Karting…

I spent a couple of hours last night playing Mario Kart Wii against a few friends – one in Mallusk and two in London. I’ve written it up here on Lategaming. It’s a good game. You should try it. Related posts: Passively Multiplayer – Massively Single Player Nintendo redux: it’s not an either-or De-Makes John … Continue reading “Wii Karting…”

I spent a couple of hours last night playing Mario Kart Wii against a few friends – one in Mallusk and two in London. I’ve written it up here on Lategaming.

It’s a good game. You should try it.

PC Gaming and Piracy

A good article on PC game piracy: Anyone who keeps track of how many PCs the “Gamer PC” vendors sell each year could tell you that it’s insane to develop a game explicitly for hard core gamers. Insane. I think people would be shocked to find out how few hard core gamers there really are … Continue reading “PC Gaming and Piracy”

A good article on PC game piracy:

Anyone who keeps track of how many PCs the “Gamer PC” vendors sell each year could tell you that it’s insane to develop a game explicitly for hard core gamers. Insane. I think people would be shocked to find out how few hard core gamers there really are out there. This data is available. The number of high end graphics cards sold each year isn’t a trade secret (in some cases you may have to get an NDA but if you’re a partner you can find out). So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? In what other market do companies do that? In other software markets, getting 1% of the target market is considered good.

This tells me:

Copy protection is worthless and every minute you spend making the most complex anti-copy mechanism possible is a minute you’re not filling your game with awesomeness.
Total user base is irrelevant and you need to think only of the people, in that userbase, who will buy.
I really should consider trying out Sins of a Solar Empire using CrossOver Games